Untitled 1961

Untitled 1961
Oil on paper.
27.56 x 39.37 in.
Signed and dated on the reverse.

Between 1959 and 1962 Kounellis, who moved to Rome for some years to finish his academic studies, created a series of works in which letters, numbers and signs asymmetrically occupy the white space of the canvas or sheet of paper; artist's writing, which yearns for a free space, indifferent to the confines of the painting, configures his first years of experimentation, characterized by intense activity and lived in an attempt to indulge the visual stimuli coming from the urban context, eliminating any trace of a some intimate effort. The refusal of a space constrained within the margins of the canvas is the basis of the exhibitions that accompany the birth of these works. Written to be sung rather than declaimed, the sheets were fixed on a loom and, in part, cut into the form of costumes. The Greek artist, wearing his own painting and mocking the linguistic difficulties encountered by those who adopt a new alphabet - as happened on the occasion of the first exhibition at Galleria La Tartaruga in Rome in 1960 - updated the image of Hugo Ball and, more in general, the phonetic poems of the Dadaists of the Cabaret Voltaire.